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  But sometimes the bad guy wins. What kind of morality is that?

  Maybe that’s the hard truth, the real truth that life teaches us. When there are ambiguous endings or the bad guy wins. Thus the metaphor for capitalism, I suppose. The character in the novel out to take down the bank or knock over the racetrack is the stripped-down robber baron with no pretense at anything else than being a gangster capitalist. Could be noir is a trap of the proletariat. Your character thinks he or she can change their station in life if only they can get away with this crime … but they’re sucked down. Though this can happen to well-off characters. Hell, sometimes the working class gets the upper hand in noir. But only sometimes.

  Recently too I saw read this mention of a nonfiction book entitled American Homicide by a historian named Randolph Roth. Roth posits that high homicide rates “are not determined by proximate causes such as poverty, drugs, unemployment, alcohol, race, or ethnicity, but by factors … like the feelings that people have toward their government and the opportunities they have to earn respect without resorting to violence.” Roth also stated that looking at FBI stats from the first six months in 2009 taken from the urban areas Obama carried in his election for the presidency, saw the steepest drop in the homicide rate since the mid-nineties.

  Of course you also have a rise in neofascist racist groups, and I include the teabaggers in this mix, as a result of Obama’s presidency, so there’s that. But it does suggest there can be further interesting takes on noir if you track Roth’s theories.

  How’d you cross the bridge from reader to writer?

  In my twenties, because I was involved in community activist work, anti-apartheid and police abuse organizing and the like, and because I had a bent for art in those days, but that was only because I wanted to draw and write comic books. This meant I’d wind up being on the committees to write and design the flyers for a march or a demonstration. Fact for a while in the mid- to late ’80s, I was the co-owner of a print shop in South Central we’d started from the funds my comrade the late Michael Zinzun had put up. He was one of the founders of the Coalition Against Police Abuse, CAPA, and had won a suit after being beaten by the Pasadena Police Department and losing an eye. Our shop, a union shop, I might add, was called 42nd Street Litho and we’d print pamphlets, newsletters, and flyers and I was always involved with writing some of those given the various organizations I was involved in as well. But like Raymond Chandler, I didn’t start ’til I was in my thirties writing fiction. By then I figured out what I wanted to do was write a book.

  Specifically I’d been fired from a union organizing job in 1989. I’d been working for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFSCME, and this particular local, Council 10, represented the groundskeepers and some of the library personnel at UCLA, the university here in Los Angeles. Having time on my hands and talking it over with my wife Gilda, I decided to take this extension class being taught at the university about writing your mystery novel. The class was taught by Bob Crais, who then was coming out of TV as a script writer on shows like Hill Street Blues and Cagney &Lacey, and had turned to writing mystery novels.

  In Bob’s class we deconstructed the first Spenser novel by Robert Parker, the Godwulf Manuscript, about this illuminated artifact being stolen. We then had to come up with an outline and the first fifty pages of our own novels. It’s there that I came up with my private eye character Ivan Monk and the people in his world. The class was over in, I think, ten weeks, but I went on and finished that first book. I didn’t get it published but was happy to have just written it.

  I guess I always knew I’d write a mystery novel because that’s what I’d been reading, all kinds of people from the established pantheon—Chandler, Hammett, and Macdonald—even Dorothy L. Sayers and her Lord Peter Wimsey stories, to black writers like Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim, Robert Beck. Iceberg, from whom rapper-actor Ice-T derived his stage moniker, had been a pimp and consorted with all types of low life individuals back east. He retired from the “Life,” and came west. He drew on those harsh experiences to craft his street level fiction for paperback originals for the white-owned Holloway House here in L.A.

  Goines, a former Air Force military policeman (he enlisted underage, using a fake birth certificate), rooty-poot pimp, petty thief, heroin addict, truck driver and hustler, among his other pursuits, wrote sixteen paperback originals for Holloway House, starting with Dopefiend, published in late 1971. His writing routine was grind out pages in the morning and go score dope in the afternoon. His last two books would be released posthumously in 1975. One was Kenyatta’s Last Hit, a series he wrote about this politicized gangster, and attributed to him, Inner City Hoodlum.

  But as Eddie Allen relates in his biography about Goines, Low Road, Inner City Hoodlum’s parentage was not Goines’ solely, but also that of a writer named Carleton Hollander. Allen states Hollander had to heavily edit and finish the uncompleted manuscript that Goines had left behind. I also know from my friend Emory Holmes, who was an editor two different times at Holloway House, that Goines’ use of heroin often impaired his page outage.

  You see, Mr. Goines exited this world in as violent a fashion as any depicted in his books. He and Shirley Sailor, who lived together and had two children, were shot to death in their apartment at 232 Cortland in Detroit, their bodies found on the morning of October 22, 1974. Fortunately, the murderers hadn’t harmed the children. Like some Ross Macdonald mystery embedded in the past but reverberating to the present day, the killers remain unidentified.

  So in those days you’d find Goines’ books and Iceberg Slim’s in my neighborhood in South Central at the Thrifty’s, the CVS drug store of its day. You wouldn’t find them at the B Dalton and the Pickwick bookstores. Now you can find their stuff at the chains. These two cats, for good and ill, are considered the godfathers of what’s called Ghetto Lit now.

  Circling back to the Godwulf Manuscript, and apropos of the kind of stories Goines and Beck wrote, what I remember in that book is Spenser beds a mother and subsequently her grown daughter in the course of the story, because he was that kind of stud. Maybe that was the lesson we were supposed to learn about PI characters.

  Well, after writing my first book, I knew I had to write another book. After the L.A. riots or the civil unrest, depending on your political point of view, in 1992, at that time I was working at a nonprofit, the Liberty Hill Foundation. Then and still today, they grant money to community organizing. So I knew a lot of the players in L.A., the mainstream local power brokers as well as grassroots people and some of the ones involved in the gang truce. Knowing this range of folks, I thought I could then write a mystery novel set after the riots—a mystery set amid a changing racial and political landscape. It was titled Violent Spring, with my PI Ivan Monk delving into the death of a Korean merchant in South Central. The book eventually got published, despite some publishers telling me in their rejection letters to drop the socio-political aspects of the novel. The book even got optioned for HBO and I did the Hollywood shuffle. Hilarious.

  But now I was hooked. I’d written one book, I had to write the next one. ’Cause you’re only as good as the last book … your last trick. Which gets us to today, twelve or so novels later and some short stories, anthologies and scripts I’ve banged out, the deal is to keep repeating the trick, which is especially arduous given the state of publishing today. Or maybe it’s easier, because you don’t have to worry about a publisher buying your next book. Anyway, maybe it’s a good thing you won’t need to publish your book in the traditional way. It’s gotten harder and harder to sell a book given it’s all about the P &L—the profit and loss on your last book.

  Is that because of e-publishing and the Kindle?

  Yeah, because with the Kindle, iPad, and what have you, and just to bite the hand that feeds, why do we need publishers, if there’s no real book, no physical copy? So what is the publisher’s role if they’re not “publishing” a hard copy of the book? We now have some c
ases of young writers like my boy Seth Harwood, who wrote Jack Wakes Up and Young Junius, who have gone this route. Initially they publish an e-book, even doing podcasts of reading the chapters. They then work the social media, Facebooking and twittering and who knows what else, building up an audience. So they can quantify a readership based on downloads and hits, and counterintuitively, the same people who got the book for free or cheap electronically, a good number of those folks, went out and bought their books when these works came out as real books. I mean, a book you can feel and smell, man.

  It seems to me then that there is still an attachment by some people to the book as an artifact. They want a hard copy sitting on their shelf. Will this be the case with the new generation?

  I don’t think so. I hope so, but young people growing up in a paperless society won’t need or want the hard copy of the book. For them a book isn’t an artifact. Conversely, there are still books that catch fire. There seems to be young people, among other people, who will go out and buy those books.

  What I’m curious about is what is the demographic breakdown of those who are buying hard copy books vs e-books. I would bet it’s heavily young people.

  My wife Gilda recently read a book on her iPhone, The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. And because she was engaged in the story, she didn’t care that she was reading it on this little device, though she showed it to me on the iPhone and the text was pretty readable. The fact remains we still need and want stories. There will always be a need and a hunger for stories. That’s just how our brains are hardwired. I guess something about order in the chaos that’s life. And we’re storytellers, whatever form that takes. Someone still has to come up with the plot, the characters and situations. But it seems to be the case now that when the publisher takes on your book, they expect you to quantify and deliver your audience.

  I try not to think too hard about the future of publishing. If I did that I’d never write another book. I just keep telling my stories and being optimistic that it will still find an audience.

  I agree.

  What’s your muse?

  Deadlines. Seriously, I’m reluctant to say that I have a muse because to me, as a commercial writer, a genre writer, I write better if I have a deadline. The pressure. If I had any muse, it would be the ghosts of my mom the librarian and my dad the mechanic who always encouraged me, particularly about writing. Especially my dad, Dikes, because he didn’t have much of an education, he had to drop out of school in the sixth grade. I grew up hearing his stories. He was born in 1912, so was a teenager and grown man during the Great Depression. He dug ditches making highways for the Works Progress Administration, was a lookout as a kid for a bootlegger in his hometown of Seguin, Texas, was an iceman delivering blocks of ice to cold water flats in Chicago, delivered bodies to the mortuary, chopped cotton for a quarter for a day’s work, and so on.

  Eventually his older brother Norman came out to L.A. and got a job and had Pop come out too. I grew up hearing his stories, of being a young man on Central Avenue, the jazz clubs and night spots then as given the segregation of L.A., blacks were on the East Side of the city and Central Avenue became the Stem, it was called, of black life. Hotels, doctors, dentists, newspapers like the Eagle and the Sentinel, they were there on or around Central Avenue. He got drafted, going to the war … I grew up hearing those stories, and those are the tales that stuck with me then and even today.

  Los Angeles itself is certainly an inspiration and a continuing character for me. I think L.A. can be plumbed for a lot of ideas. As thin as the L.A. Times is now, there’s always something you read in the paper, see on the news, hear somewhere that invariably sparks an idea in me. I carry that around with me and make little notes. At some point it worries your brain enough that you have to write the story.

  I’m also fascinated with the retelling of tales often told. How many versions of timeless iconic characters like Frankenstein, Sherlock Holmes, and Robin Hood are there … yet there always seem to be room for more—allowing for different angles and perspectives on the characters. Or take the late comedian, the monologist Lord Buckley, Richard Buckley. This big, six-foot-six onetime lumberjack white guy from the sticks in upper California, who reinvents himself as a bebop hipster with a baritone voice, a pith helmet, and Salvador Dalí-type moustache doing a aristocratic English accent knocking it back with black slang.

  “But I’m gonna put a cat on you who was the coolest, grooviest, sweetest, wailin’est strongest cat that ever stomped on this sweet, swingin’ sphere. And they called this here cat, the Nazz.”

  This is part of Buckley’s version of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Cool and crazy. See, it’s all in the telling.

  Someone, I forget who, said, you will write when it hurts more not to write. Agree?

  (Nods) Plus writing is such good therapy. I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t write.

  And L.A. is such a rich cauldron to draw from: various classes, races, cultures, undocumented immigration …

  Absolutely.

  They’re not going to stop coming. Until we help stabilize Mexico’s economy, stop selling them guns and genetically modified corn. No border can stop it. We are all part of a continuum.

  That’s right. Our job is to go out and get those stories and tell them.

  What’s noir then?

  Looking at this book you have here on your table about William Mulholland, who engineered the bringing of water, or some would argue helped steal that water, to make what has become the modern metropolis of Los Angeles, drives home the concept of L.A. as the seat or crucible of noir. Even though the word ’noir’ is bandied about a lot these days, to me the term refers to a doomed character or characters consumed or at least driven by lust, greed, gluttony, revenge … one of those baser instincts of us humans.

  Invariably this bent mental state gets the character all caught up; when they should turn left they turn right, when they should keep walking, they turn the knob on that battered door and their fate can only spiral down into the velvet whirlpool. Noir means doomed characters in search of a doomed destiny, but they don’t know this and they can’t help themselves. They’re self-deluded but they’re making themselves self deluded by lust or greed. Usually it’s one of the seven deadly sins but there are only two or three of those that really trip people up. Ha.

  They can’t see up for down, wrong for right, because they want something. It’s usually not a big thing. It’s a reasonable thing. They want money but they don’t want a lot of money. A couple hundred thousand, let’s say. Or you desire your neighbor’s wife ’cause she looks so damn good in that summer dress.

  So noir is personal?

  It’s your own undoing that you if not willingly, at least subconsciously, participate in and bring about. When you should make a left turn, you make a right. When you should lock that door, you open it. Because you’re driven, obsessed. Often it’s a situation you’ve put yourself in. Noir will kill ya.

  Denise Hamilton writes crime fiction set in contemporary, multicultural Los Angeles. Her novels have been shortlisted for every major mystery award. She is also the editor of the Edgar Award winning short story anthology Los Angeles Noir (that Phillips has a story in) and Los Angeles Noir 2: the Classics. Visit her at www.denisehamilton.com.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  The Underbelly (2010)

  The Jook (1999, and PM Press, 2009)

  The Perpetrators (2002)

  Bangers (2003)

  Freedom’s Fight (2009)

  Kings of Vice (2010)

  Ivan Monk Series

  Violent Spring (1994)

  Perdition, U.S.A. (1995)

  Bad Night Is Falling (1998)

  Only the Wicked (2000)

  Monkology: 13 Stories From the World of Private Eye Ivan Monk (2004)

  Martha Chainey Series

  High Hand (2000)

  Shooter’s Point (2001)

  Short Stories

  “King Cow” & “Hollywood Killer,” Angel
town: The Nate Hollis Investigations (2010)

  “The Investor,” Damn Near Dead 2 (2010)

  “The Performer,” Orange County Noir (2010)

  “The Snow Birds” Once Upon a Crime (2009)

  “Blazin’ on Broadway,” Phoenix Noir (2009)

  “The Thrill is Gone,” Sex, Lies and Private Eyes (2009)

  “The New Me,” Noir: A Collection of Crime Comics (2009)

  “House of Tears,” Black Noir: Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Stories by African-American Writers (2009). Originally ran in the first issue of Murdaland.

  “Swift Boats for Jesus,” Politics Noir (2008)

  “The Freeze Devil,” The Avenger Chronicles (2008)

  “The Kim Novak Effect,” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (2008).

  Reprinted in Between the Dark and the Daylight.

  “And What Shall We Call You?” The Darker Mask: Heroes from the Shadows (2008)

  “Roger Crumbler Considered His Shave,” Los Angeles Noir, (2007)

  “Where All Our Dreams Come True,” Hollywood and Crime: Original Crime Stories Set During the History of Hollywood (2007)

  “Sportin’ Men,” Full House, (2007)

  “The Man For the Job,” Dublin Noir: The Celtic Tiger vs. The Ugly American (2006)

  “Blues, Sex, and Bad Hot Mojo” & “Broken Willow,” Kolchak: The Night Stalker Casebook (2006)

  “Incident on Hill 19,” Retro Pulp Tales (2006)

  “The Socratic Method,” amazon.com shorts (2006)

  “Disco Zombies,” Cocaine Chronicles (2005)

  “Searching for Cisa,” Kolchak: The Night Stalker Chronicles (2005)

  “Chatter,” Plots With Guns: A Noir Anthology (2005)